Hello everyone - We have left the Beagle Channel and begun our 1,500 mile-run up the coast of Chile against the prevailing winds. Right now we are tucked back into a tiny little cove at the head of a narrow fjord surrounded by gray cliffs almost bare of vegetation. The only trees, stunted beech trees no more than twenty feet high, in the entire three-mile long fjord lie in this cove, on low hummocks to either side of us and up the slope behind us, and we've tied four shorelines to them and pulled ourselves within twenty feet of shore. As we'd been told and now learned at first hand, such trees indicate places where shelter can be found from the incessant wind, and pulling the boat right back into them is the best way to ensure a decent night's sleep. We've been glad of the protection - the wind has been blowing at gale- to storm-force for the last three days, and we've had regular squalls of hail and sleet which lay blankets of snow on the high peaks around us. The temperatures have been in the forties, but our heater has kept the cabin cozy. And this is high summer!

Our fjord lies off the entrance to the Cockburn Channel, a wide channel between the Beagle and the Straits of Magellan that opens out into the Pacific. When we round this corner, we'll go up one of three channels to the Magellan, on a northerly course for the first time since we rounded the northwest corner of Iceland in June. We hope to reach Puerto Montt in April or May, head back to the States for a bit during the southern winter, and then back to Hawk to sail some more in the northern (warm!) parts of the Chilean channels before heading back down here again next year. Of our last six weeks of sailing, the most spectacular by far has to be the northeast arm of the Beagle Channel.

The Beagle splits at Punta Divide on Isla Gordon, about 80 miles west of the eastern entrance from the Atlantic, and the northeast arm runs for close to thirty miles along the length of that island before terminating in a confusion of passes, islands and canals. Along its length, a half a dozen major glaciers roll in huge, frozen white and blue waves down from the peaks to reach sea level in the channel itself. Born eons ago in the frosty air of the 6,000 to 8,000 foot high peaks to the north of the channel, and fed by the year-round snow squalls at those altitudes, the brilliant white snowfields at the top of these glaciers cover the shoulders and bowls under the stony peaks before spilling down the ravines between the massifs in rivers of white ice cut by horizontal fractures caused by the slow slippage of highly compacted ice down the steep slopes. When illuminated by the sun, incredible colors flash from the walls of ice within these striations - the breathtaking blue of topaz and the hard green glow of emerald. Beyond the end of the Beagle Channel, a half dozen more glaciers covering an area of several hundred square miles terminate at the tops of long fjords accessible from the main channel. These can be seen in the mountains to the north of the channel, their snowfields sitting like cloaks drawn tight around the necks of ice carved granite peaks. Our first night's anchorage in the Beagle may well be the most spectacular anchorage we have ever seen. Just beyond Isla Diablo off Punta Divide, Caleta Olla lies under a sheer cliff below the 6,500 foot high Pico Frances. While this and the highest peak along the channel, Monte Darwin (8,000 feet high), and their associated snowfields had been visible almost from Puerto Williams, we had still caught little more than glimpses of the ice rivers below them. But as we came around the island and our anchorage opened up in front of us, the shoulder of the mountain that had been hiding the glacier from our view also slid aside. Ventisquero Hollandia, the Holland Glacier, appeared all at once with Pico Frances high above.

Lacy clouds spread delicate tendrils across the cutoff face of the cleaved peak rising from the shadowless snowfields, and the low-angled rays of the sun revealed a range of orange and red highlights within the sheer face of gray rock. The pristine white snow covered the steep slopes below the peak, running down for several thousand feet to the altitude where the Nothofagus beech forest began, punctuated by other, lower crags and shoulders. The broad band of trees ended at a sheer cliff that formed the back of the harbor we were entering. The snowfield split above the trees, running off to the west out of sight over a high ridge. To the east, it turned to glacier ice, and swept down around the edge of the forest and the cliff below along a ravine running some miles behind the cliff face. A broad curve of white snow and green or blue ice, it had cut its way down that ravine, carving a path through the forest, rising to a height well above tree level, leaving broken trees along its edge that looked no larger than matchsticks. One final twist at the bottom of the ravine, and it spilled around the edge of the cliff and expired at sea level, a mile or two from the shore of the bay we were entering. In its dying, it had created a marshy estuary with its terminal moraine, and we could look up that to the base of the glacier as we passed into the anchorage.

After anchoring in a sheltered cove just out of sight of the glacier that night, we started down "glacier alley" the next day. The next glacier, Italia, proved to be the most spectacular in the area. This came down a very steep slope between two massifs, and could be glimpsed as a raised bridge of ice and snow over the shoulder of the ridge as we approached. But only when in front of it could we see its entire expanse, as it came straight down from the towering snowfields above in one broad cascade of giant steps where the frozen ice had sheered and slipped under its weight and the pull of gravity. On the exposed ice faces, the sun flashed off translucent blue highlights, winking and shimmering like a mirage. This glacier ended as a sheer ice face hundreds of feet high no more than fifty feet from the main channel, but separated from us by a boulder-strewn moraine. The scale was almost impossible to absorb as we were looking at a frozen river falling at a thirty- or forty-degree angle straight down the west face of Pico Frances from a height of at least 4,000 feet. A few icebergs floated at the base, trapped by the shallow moraine the retreating ice wall had left in its wake.

Though the sailing has proven challenging and handling shorelines with two people continues to be a learning experience, this area has already proven to be everything we had hoped for and dreamed of when we started building Hawk seven years ago.

Here's to dreams come true! Beth and Evans s/v Hawk